What Poet Doesn't Occasionally Slip into the Ridiculous re the Essence of Poetry?
The following is a quote from J. M. Coetzee's essay on Joseph Brodsky, "The Essays of Joseph Brodsky": There is thus no doubt that Brodsky in exile remained a powerful presence on the Russian stage. Receptive as his fellow writers are to his innovations, however, all except Rein seem skeptical about the full metaphysical baggage behind them, a metaphysics that makes the poet the voice of an hypostatized Language. Lev Loseff dismisses this "idolization" of language out of hand, attributing it to Brodsky's lack of formal education in linguistics (p. 123).